There is a quiet restaurant on North Capitol Street in
Washington just a stone's throw from the Senate offices called "Power's
Court." It is always clubby and dark and cool inside, even when the midday
sun otherwise bakes the District. It is one of those special places in
Washington where powerful members and senior staff meet with influential Hill
denizens to court each others' power. More national policy is made over lunch at
Power's Court in one week than we can trace in the aggregate to all of the
university campuses in the country over the course of an entire congressional
session. Nobody goes there for the food.

That is probably no great surprise to anyone in this room. We aren't often
called by our congressional or state or provincial representatives seeking our
advice on a measure pending on the floor. We offer testimony at various hearings
from time to time, and will on rare occasions even see some of what we know
included in a committee report. But we are well-aware of the chasm that exists
between that which is political and that which is academic. Indeed, in the
popular jargon, the phrase "it's academic" is synonymous with
"not relevant." And yet, for many years the vital role played by our
universities was respected by our governments, even when they tossed an
occasional barb in our direction for galloping esotericism. On the whole, the
underlying notions that supported the existence of and investment in strong
universities went unexamined and unchallenged.

Things are now very different. We're largely out of the loop. The gap between
the public legislator and the public educator is becoming a canyon, a chasm
whose walls are moving apart at an ever-increasing rate. That should be very
important to us, because our destiny is controlled far more by the lawmakers
than theirs is by us. When the budget folks look at us these days, they no
longer see a sacred cow; what they see is a tasty steak dinner.

Our federal and state legislatures are themselves being transformed by
successive waves of voter dissatisfaction. In the wake of the "throw the
bums out" election of '94, we are beginning to see a more contentious,
anti-intellectual, anti-elitist public sentiment increasingly being championed
by the legislators themselves. Virtually overnight and without dialogue, the
value of an elite university education has been devalued as a matter of public
policy.

The lion's share of public funding for post-secondary education in the United
States has already been targeted at the non-baccalaureate level, primarily for
occupational training and retraining. Higher education at the Bachelor's level
and above is, increasingly, viewed as a frill, at least in terms of public
priorities.

How did this shift come about? Thirty years ago the universities were seen as
the great hope of America. We were in the midst of a cold war, perched on the
brink of global thermonuclear devastation. Our universities were in the front
lines of that cold war, challenging the Russians for technological superiority.
At the same time, on the domestic front a renewed emphasis on social reform
elevated the social sciences to a new position of prominence. In a time of
unchallenged economic superiority, public resources flowed almost unchecked into
the academy, and higher education thrived in a resource-rich environment. The
only competition we faced was among ourselves.

Today, the cold war is over, the Great Society is under attack from every
degree of the political spectrum, the U.S. has lost its economic advantage, and
the percentage of public resources allocated to higher education is shrinking at
an alarming rate.

Federal and state lawmakers have discovered a popular vein of anti-elitism,
fed by an unending notion of economic uncertainty. In lock step many
legislatures have begun the hunt for loose fat and soft underbellies. My belief
is that we are not witnessing just another cycle of public scrutiny. For a
number of reasons that I will touch upon, it goes to the core of what we are
this time.

Our greatest strength has become a liability. When the legislatures attack
us, it is for them a way of distancing themselves from the taint of aristocracy.
What we call excellence, they now call elitism. Preeminence has, in the public
mind, been transposed into extravagance. Legislators are discovering that higher
education is far more vulnerable than it is venerable. In a time of limited
public resources, excellence has become excess. Criticism of higher education
places the critic apart from the public perception of waste and irrelevance in
our educational and political institutions. The guy who aims the spotlight is
rarely in it.

In California, prison guards are paid more than university faculty with the
same number of years' tenure. A public poll conducted by the State University
found overwhelming support for that spread. When I mentioned that study to a
highly placed Cornell graduate, his reply was "Well, of course. The prison
guards' job is more dangerous." And this is from an alum who is a major
donor! Are we missing something here? Let me present just a few benchmarks of
where I think we are in the minds of the legislators, and then I'll say a few
words about what I think we need to do about it.

This is last month's issue of "Governing" magazine, perhaps the
most widely read publication for those in state government. Its cover story is
titled, "Hard Questions for Higher Education." The report inside is
chilling. Let me read you a few excerpts:

Wayne Jones feels confident he knows as well as anyone what ails
higher education in Ohio. For one thing, compared with most of his legislative
colleagues, he hasn't been out of it that long. It was just 12 years ago, at
age 29, that he graduated from the University of Akron.

It was an innocuous 1993 press release from his alma mater that really set
Jones off. The release heralded a lucrative research grant landed by a
University of Akron professor. That fact in itself was worthy of commendation.
The object of the research, Jones felt, was not.

The award to study medieval Italian marble formations, in his view,
symbolized much of what was wrong with the state of public higher education.
It was yet another example of how far the priorities of academe had veered
away from those of the taxpayers. It was time spent on research of dubious
value to Ohio's economy, or the needs of the university's undergraduates. So
Jones decided to take some symbolic action of his own. He introduced a measure
aimed at forcing professors back into the classroom.

And largely because he was education finance chairman at the time, his
measure made it through the legislative process and became law. As a result,
professors at Ohio's state-supported institutions of higher learning must
spent 10 percent more time in the classroom teaching undergraduates than they
did in 1990. "It really wasn't done to bring the whip and chain to the
college professors," Jones insists. "It was to send a message to the
higher education community that we're watching."

Behind the questioning lurks what some legislators see as the ultimate
weapon: performance-based funding of higher education. Several states are
already taking tentative steps toward rewarding and penalizing public
universities on the basis of predetermined goals or accountability measures.
How far the performance movement will ultimately go is open to considerable
doubt. But it stands as a symbol of the pressure that these institutions are
suddenly under to explain what kind of return taxpayers are getting for their
money.

In Colorado last year, yet another ill-fated press release announced that a
vice chancellor at the state university's Colorado Springs campus was granted
a leave to "read Aristotle and Shakespeare and reactivate my sense of
scholarship." While the leave in question did not seem far-fetched to the
university officials who approved it, the chairman of the legislature's joint
budget committee failed to see the Logic. He pushed through legislation
abolishing administrative sabbaticals and tightening oversight of faculty
leaves.

Is the handwriting on the walls? Are the Huns at the gates? No. They're
already past the gates, and they're headed for the big house on the hill!

Something very important is going to happen starting in 1997, something you
haven't read about yet. The Congress is going to take two years to completely
rewrite the Higher Education Reauthorization Act. This is the big one, the one
Congress considers only once every five years. It determines what kind of
programs can be funded with any federal funds, and what constraints are attached
to that funding. Now, if you have been following what the Family Values
Coalition has had to say about other social institutions, what do you think they
are going to say about higher education?

The Congress has already begun dismantling the foundations of entitlement
upon which the modern state has been built. The outcome of the '96 presidential
elections may determine how fast and with how much relish they will go after
higher ed, but not "whether." That die is cast. The word
"accountability" has been a popular one the past two years, and anyone
who still thinks that there will not be significant new demands for university
accountability is, in my opinion, one of the better examples of the triumph of
hope over experience.

In 1775, Patrick Henry said: "It is natural to man to indulge in the
illusions of hope. We are apt to shut out eyes against a painful truth."
This truth we know all too well. What is less well-known is what a graduate of
the ILR School, now one of the top CEOs in the country, once told me: "When
you have an ugly problem, the only thing to do it walk right up to it, wrap your
arms around it and give it a hug. Only when you get to know it well can you
begin to solve it." I humbly suggest that higher education has had no
greater threat to its institutional momentum than exists now on the legislative
horizon. It is time to start hugging the problem.

There will be no middle ground. The coming debate, in the Congress and in
your state legislative chambers, will be like meeting a tiger in the jungle:
either you are going to get severely mauled, or you will climb up on its back
and ride. We cannot ignore the growing tide. The private sector is full of
out-of-work executives who shut their eyes to the fact that
"reengineering" meant "them."

Well, what can we do about it? I don't have all the answers, but I believe I
have some of the answers. A little-known American philosopher named Josiah Royce
put it this way: "A man who knows what a tiger is, is a man who knows what
to do in the presence of a tiger."

We must do what we do best: investigate, gain understanding, and educate.
While many of our legislators are newly-elected, and eschew alliances of the
past, they are open to new ideas if presented in a cooperative and unselfish
context. We can and should seek them out and form alliances with them. We have
the capability of providing technical assistance, issue briefings, policy
analysis, and access to the scholarly networks of the academy, if we choose to
do that.

New distance learning technologies are now available to allow the academy to
reach beyond its hallowed walls and into the communities where their expertise
is needed most. In fact, we can now appear in the hearing rooms and offices of
the legislature to provide testimony and objective research findings with the
flick of a switch. We in higher education can become an active partner, a
helpful partner, of those who would dismantle or significantly alter much of
what we hold to be important.

Video-teleconferencing and Web technology can put each state's university
assets at the fingertips of the lawmakers in an active partnership designed to
address pressing social problems. We can open our classrooms for public hearings
and link the legislative leaders to their constituencies. When the lawmakers
tackle welfare reform, we can instantly transport them into the classroom while
our top faculty debate various alternative approaches to the problem. We can
convene the assembly and write the agenda instead of just reacting from afar.

We can, in fact, assume the leadership role in the debate, but a substantial
amount of risk-taking is involved, which is why most of us have never seen the
inside of a legislative chamber. Doesn't matter. The world is a different place
from the halcyon days of the medieval walled city, and there is no acceptable
alternative. We have to get out there and provide real and meaningful assistance
to the political leadership.

I have heard "real leadership" defined as "the willingness to
talk truth to power." I suspect that's the crux of it. On our campuses
today, some of our colleagues fashion themselves still very much behind that
stone wall, expecting to always be nurtured within the ivory tower by a grateful
society. Some of our administrators are still telling the emperor that his new
clothes look positively smashing. But those who can clearly see the future have
a responsibility to not only inform their colleagues that the sky is, in fact,
falling, but also to take the lead in doing something about it.

We must talk truth to power, both within and outside the walls of our
universities. In today's just-in-time world, we are best-positioned to direct
attention to the overarching long-range issues that will create the environment
for tomorrow's challenges. If we do not stand watch for the future, who will? We
must be the risk-takers, seeking out those who would do us the greatest harm,
and educate them about the value of the university. We can do this best by
example, not rhetoric. We have to be willing to get into the trenches, to stand
beside them and see the world as they do. Only then can we hope to have them
understand the value of basic research, of academic freedom, of scholarly
pursuit.

The new technologies provide an inexpensive means for us to do much of this.
Our actions will define a new paradigm for the transmission of knowledge to
those unable to join us on our campuses. That new model will not only serve our
students and potential students well, it will also serve our own interests well,
for it will place us foursquare at the center of the revolution that is going on
all around us. The timely and wise utilization of distance learning technologies
will not result in the dismantling of the walls that surround the academy, for
they will still be needed, but for a new purpose. We will stand on them so we
can be seen and heard from a greater distance.

Universities, like the law, in the words of Oliver Wendall Holmes, "must
be stable, but cannot stand still." I am not suggesting that we tear down
our ivory towers; what I am suggesting is that we open them to the people who
built them. It is in our own enlightened self-interest as well as in the
long-range interest of our society that we begin to extend the academy to those
who would devastate what they have assembled. We must get to know the tiger.
When we are truly willing to make their problems our problems, and devote our
substantial resources to their solution, then and only then will we find
ourselves seated at their table, and they at ours, as active participants in the
design of our respective tomorrows.

There is a role for the medieval model in higher education, and it is a noble
and important one. But while that model provides stability, it cannot stand
still. Every ounce of stability must be balanced by an equal measure of
flexibility. Beyond that, for each new technology that we integrate into our
instructional and outreach programs, we must be willing to rejuvenate our
institutions by putting an end to those programs that are no longer appropriate
or relevant to our mission. Only when we have achieved the appropriate balance
of stability, flexibility, integration, and rejuvenation, will growth take
place.

Recently there was a news story about the monks in upstate New York who bake
Monks' Bread. The income derived from baking and selling that bread allows them
to continue their centuries-old monastic practices, unchanged by the new world
in which they find themselves. I would suggest that model, in one form or
another, works for all of us.

I want to end on an upbeat note, and it is that the future can be what we
want it to be. The demographics support the timely implementation of these new
technologies, as the "baby-boom echo" is about to enter that
educational python. The numbers of high school graduates will swell by twenty
percent over the next ten years, actually by even more than twenty percent that
if some of the educational reforms now being enacted at the K-12 level are
successful. At the same time, given current trends, access will be more limited,
and we can now begin to plan for the implementation of those outreach
technologies that will share our resources with an even larger number of
traditional and non-traditional students. There will be plenty of good students
to pick from and, increasingly, they will be people of color, they will be
poorer, and they will be older than today's students.

Many of our future students will also be non-traditional students: they will
hold a full-time job, and they will require education not at one moment in their
lives, but at all moments in their lives. They will attend class in the virtual
classroom, and they may purchase educational modules from a variety of
suppliers. We may begin to serve dual roles, as both suppliers and brokers. We
need to begin to address this new paradigm for higher education, one that
defines an ongoing relationship with our students, utilizing new technologies to
forge dynamic partnerships with students and employers as well as governments
and other universities.

It will be up to us whether we rise to that challenge, developing a community
of leaders who, when some of them enter the legislature, will return to our
campuses and ask, "how can we work together?" If we are successful in
reaching out to those students, if we are successful in working hand-in-hand
with our legislatures, if we are up to the task of speaking truth to power, then
we will ride that tiger into the new millennium.

It remains for us to demonstrate that the real power's court is not a
restaurant in Washington at all. Rather, the real court of power resides in our
libraries and in our classrooms and in our laboratories and, ultimately, in the
minds of those whom we might enlighten...if we choose to do so.